Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Millions of Fake Instagram Users Disappear in Purge

By Vindu Goel December 18, 2014 8:59 pmDecember 18, 2014 8:59 pm

Photo

Instagram is deleting all the accounts it had previously designated as “spammy.”Credit Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press

Social media services like Facebook and Twitter are always battling against spam or fake accounts that hijack hashtags, artificially pump up follower counts for celebrities and brands and inflate costs for advertisers that want to reach real customers, not automated bots.

This week, we got a look at just how many junk accounts there really are on Instagram, the four-year-old photo and video sharing service owned by Facebook. In what has been called the “Instagram Rapture,” the company is deleting all the accounts it had previously designated as “spammy” from the follower counts of its users. And for some high-profile accounts, a lot of users have been vaporized.

Celebrities also saw millions of followers vanish. The singer Justin Bieber lost 3.5 million fans, or 15 percent of his total, according to Mr. Allia’s calculations. Kim Kardashian lost 1.3 million followers, or 5.5 percent of her fan base on the service.

At stake isn’t just bragging rights, but real money. Social media users with big fan bases can snag lucrative promotional deals from companies eager for them to send out an endorsement to their fans. As my colleague Nick Bilton wrote earlier this year, there is a thriving black market in social media friendship, with a million Instagram followers going for the bargain price of $3,700 in April.

Both Twitter and Facebook have told investors that less than 5 percent of their accounts are fake or spam.

Gabe Madway, an Instagram spokesman, did not dispute Mr. Allia’s calculations of the sharp drop in followers for some popular Instagram accounts, including the company’s own.

But he noted that the purged accounts already had been deactivated for a significant period of time for sending spam or otherwise violating Instagram’s terms of service. The company was only now getting around to deleting all those dead accounts from the follower counts of other users. From now on, purges will be more continuous as fake or spam accounts are deleted, he said.